George Washington Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. How could 1st. and 3rd president owned slaves?

Those two were not the only U.S. Presidents who owned slaves. Through the final decades of the 1700s and the first half of the 1800s, many prominent American politicians were slaveowners. That includes not only Presidents but also members of Congress, Cabinet Secretaries, and Supreme Court Justices, among other officials. (Try this experiment -- research the 15 pre-Civil War Presidents, George Washington through James Buchanan, and see whether those who owned slaves outnumbered those who didn't.) It's an ugly truth of U.S. history that lots of early leaders with many positive accomplishments to their credit were also implicated in the great crime against humanity (and against American values) that was the U.S. slave system.